Bravo's Day

The bank job was given out before breakfast and I was not there when it happened, which matters.

It went to a fluff who is frightened of the bank. They said yes. They said yes in front of about fifteen fluffs, at speed, with everybody looking, at half past seven in the morning — and if you have ever been in that exact spot you will know that saying anything other than yes would have taken about four times the courage of actually going down the bank.

Hushy heard them say "oh" afterwards. Just that. One syllable, under all the noise, which nobody else in the entire land caught. Hushy told Chatty. Chatty came down the lane at speed and told everybody who could do anything about it, and by mid-morning it had got to me.

"I'll take it," I said.

"You don't have to," said Pinky.

"I know."

The bank was worse than it looked, and it looked bad. Wet, steep, all loose stuff underfoot, with a good crop of nettles at the bottom and four lanterns down in them.

I stood at the top and the whole thing arrived at once. The drop. The slipperiness. A very clear picture of myself going down it considerably faster than planned.

Now. Here is what I have always done at this exact point, for as long as I can remember. I say easy! and I go.

I did not say easy.

"I'm scared of this bit," I said. Out loud. To nobody in particular.

Shivvy, who had come along to point out where the black bits were going to be, went completely still. "You are?"

"Feel it in my feet," I said. "Right, then." One breath in. One small step sideways, onto the part that looked solid.

It was solid. So was the next one. Four lanterns came up out of those nettles one at a time, passed hand to hand.

And at the top, Shivvy said: "I didn't know you got scared."

"Everybody knows now," I said. "That's the improvement."

The bit I did not notice at the time, and only worked out afterwards, is that Shivvy had come three steps down that bank behind me without seeming to notice doing it.

Boingy went down that same bank later in the afternoon, after the last lantern in the nettles, the one further out on the part that goes over. I was not there. Boingy told me about it at the party, cheerfully, with nettle stings all up both arms: the arriving at the bottom in a sitting position, the lying there a good while with the day carrying on above, Pouty sitting at the top keeping company from a safe height and not once telling him to get up.

And then coming back up along the bit that was solid — which is the way I had gone down that morning, sideways, slowly.

"I was in far too much of a hurry to notice it the first time," Boingy said.

I am usually somewhere near the middle of a party and I was, for a while.

But the thing that stayed with me all evening was not the bank. It was the seven-thirty in the morning of it — a yard full of fluffs, and a job going out, and somebody saying yes with their whole face saying no, and fifteen of us standing there not seeing it.

I said so to Pinky, at about ten o'clock, by the dresser.

"I've done that," I said. "Said yes because of the watching. Loads of times. I just usually get away with it, because the thing I've said yes to is something I can do."

Pinky thought about that for a while and said, "So has everyone in this room."

Beamy read the envelope out and my line was Bravo — took the bank, said it was frightening first. Then Rainbow did the counting-off, and there was a bit in it about the ones who felt the scared and went anyway, and I looked at Shivvy instead of at Rainbow, because Shivvy had walked the hedge tunnel that night without holding on to anything.